When managing a chronic health condition — pain, inflammation, hypothyroidism, an autoimmune disease — it’s easy to get caught up in the nuts and bolts of care. Strategies such as an anti-inflammatory diet, supplements, medications, sleep hygiene, exercise, and other functional medicine protocols can consume your thoughts and Google searches. Don’t get me wrong, these…

So how exactly do happiness, positivity, and socialization improve health? They profoundly influence stress levels, inflammation, and the release of feel-good chemicals, all of which play roles in autoimmune management. Social isolation, pessimistic thinking, toxic relationships, unhappy marriages, dead-end jobs, living a life without meaning or purpose — all these factors raise stress, perpetuate immune…

Go here to read Part I: New food sensitivity issues on AIP? The oral tolerance protocol In my first article on oral tolerance, I talked about why many people develop an increasing number of food sensitivities on restrictive healing diets and what to do about it. The primary cause is called loss of oral tolerance, and…

Advances in testing for gluten intolerance offer accurate assessment Gluten intolerance has been linked in the literature to 55 diseases so far, most of them autoimmune. Fortunately a revolutionary breakthrough in gluten reactivity testing at Cyrex Labs, founded on years of leading immunological research, is now available to help determine whether this ubiquitous substance is damaging…

A recent study we conducted showed infections — bacterial, viral, parasitic, mold and yeast — may trigger the development of Alzheimer’s disease in a mechanism similar to the development of autoimmunity. The study, published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease (JAD), examined how infections may play a role in the development of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD). We performed…

Many people with autoimmune and chronic health conditions follow specialized dietary and lifestyle protocols to manage their condition yet find they still suffer from symptoms. One culprit to investigate is whether your supplement ingredients and medications are triggering inflammation. Easy access to supplements is a mixed blessing The United States benefits from wide access to nutritional supplements,…

If you suffer from poor brain function or chronic gastrointestinal complaints, you may benefit from improving the connection between the gut and the brain, called the gut-brain axis. Central to the gut-brain axis is the vagus nerve — a long, meandering nerve that extends from the base of the brainstem down to the major organs.…

Every day our bodies work hard to cope with the effects of environmental toxins, food intolerances, inflammatory diets high in sugar but low in nutrients, sleep deprivation, and chronic stress. To minimize the damage, it’s important to support levels of glutathione, a powerful antioxidant produced by the body. This can be done by taking glutathione…

It wasn’t long ago that the “autoimmune protocol (AIP diet)” was unknown term for what used to be known in functional medicine as the “elimination and provocation diet.” Today, the AIP diet is a well-known tool in autoimmune management, and thousands of autoimmune patients have used it successfully to help recover their health. However, while…